Chennai, Jul 15 (IANS): The newly appointed state president of the Tamil Nadu unit of the BJP, K. Annamalai will take charge at the party-state committee office on Friday. He replaces Loganathan Murugan who has joined Narendra Modi's council of ministers as a Union Minister of State for Fisheries and Animal Husbandry.

Annamalai has commenced a two-day journey from his hometown of Coimbatore and has vowed that his immediate aim is to revive the party-state unit and to make it a fighting force.

While speaking to reporters at Tiruppur en route to Chennai, the BJP leader said that his party is the only political party with a strong ideological base and that the party will capture power in Tamil Nadu in the near future.

Annamalai, who had quit the Indian Police Service (IPS), said that the new party-state leadership would be a mixture of both senior leaders and young Turks and added that he would act as a catalyst against the ruling DMK.

He charged the Stalin government with providing false vaccine figures to the centre and added that the functionaries of the ruling party created a false shortage of vaccines. He said that the state government and its functionaries were blaming the centre unnecessarily after creating a false vaccine shortage.

The BJP leader said that the policies of the Central government including the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) would transform Tamil Nadu into a better state.

Annamalai said that he considered himself as a servant and not as a leader and added that the saffron party would emerge as the strongest party in Tamil Nadu soon and would get the maximum number of seats in 2024 general elections.

Taking a dig at the Congress, he said that the BJP is a political party driven by ideology and not like parties that are ruled by dynasties.